Fran: V is for Valentine

V is for Valentine, Genevieve Valentine, and her book Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.

This is a weird book--very literary, almost poetic--set in a dystopia of a ruined world with little city-states.  The circus travels from place to place and are very much the close-knit group coming into communities where they don't fit.  In this respect, Valentine keeps the conventions of the circus--attracting the weird and misfits, who bond together because they cannot bond elsewhere.  The ringleader is Boss--a woman with a tragic background that gives her strange powers to create the mechanical human hybrids of the Circus Tresaulti; Boss takes the broken bodies of people, often near death, and infuses them with machinery.  The most glorious characters include Panadrome, the human headed music box, Alec and Bird, characters who (at different points) are created with wings, Ayers the strong man able to do feats beyond normal because of his machinery.  Most of the book is told from the viewpoint of Little George, the circus gofer, who longs for the mechanization that the rest of the circus has and which Boss denies him (he wears fake metal on his legs when they stop in towns).  Valentine plays this feeling as well with Stenos--the man who partners with Bird because he longs himself for the wings that make her Bird.

The first 2/3rds of the book are somewhat slow and I found myself slogging through.  The last section is a set piece in which Boss, having been captured by the mayor of one of the towns who hopes to use her power for his own army, is rescued by the circus.  The conflicts between Bird and Stenos, between Elena (the brass boned trapeze artist) and almost everyone else, the new role for Little George (which I will not spoil) come to a head in this section.  Perhaps it's my flaw as a reader that I was reading for plot and so really felt that I had been rewarded by something finally happening in this book. 

Literary science fiction/fantasy (a Nebula award short-listed book); interesting world creation; somewhat disappointing overall.